Another Hastings must-read.
The master of military history takes on Britain’s celebrated May 1943 Dam Buster air attack.
As his latest skillful history demonstrates, Hastings (Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, 2018) is still on top of his game, showing once again that the preparations, participants, and consequences of a military action are as fascinating as the fireworks. By the outbreak of World War II, British intelligence had figured out which German targets were most essential to its war effort. Near the top were several dams in the Ruhr valley. Destroying such massive structures required explosives and accuracy beyond current technology, but officials listened when engineer Barnes Wallis proposed a huge bomb that would skip along the water, strike its target, and sink to allow surrounding water to multiply the explosive force. Skeptics abounded, but many leaders cherished fantasies about a dramatic stroke that would bring a quick victory. Wrote one, “if this new weapon is intelligently used…industry in Germany would be so crippled as to have a decisive effect on the duration of the war.” Hastings delivers his usual expert account of the preparations, which involved two years of testing and two months of training. Although described as a “crack squadron,” the fliers were a mixed group. Some volunteered, but many crews were simply transferred to the unit. Flight leader Guy Gibson was a genuine hero, fearless and keenly appreciated by superiors but not popular with his subordinates. The author’s gripping account of the mission features many errors, heroics, and terrible losses. Bombs destroyed two dams, and the survivors returned to universal acclaim. Many historians look unfavorably on the results, but Hastings maintains that the raid was among the most damaging of the war. Sadly, Allied commanders continued their inexplicable habit of not following up successes. Continued conventional bombing would have hampered repair work, but it was absent; the dams were back in operation within months. The author also provides a list of the crew and two clear timelines of significant events.
Another Hastings must-read.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295363-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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